Amnesty #Schrijfmarathon

Write for Rights – Every year, around Human Rights Day on December 10th, hundreds of thousands of people around the world write letters and send email messages to help people they’ve never met. Letter writing has always been at the core of Amnesty’s work, and 54 years of human rights activism show that letters really do have the power to change lives.

In the Netherlands the Amnesty #Schrijfmarathon is a recurring event as well. Everybody is invited to write letters in a “writing marathon” that lasts 24 hours. During this day, the office of Amnesty International is transformed in one big letter writing factory. For people that are being tortured for their beliefs, discriminated for who they are or jailed for their opinion.

For the 2015 edition of the #Schrijfmarathon we asked influencers to join the cause… And with success!

Approach

Each year a small number of cases are highlighted. These are the people that Amnesty focuses on. We matched influencers that could identify themselves with one of the cases, based on occupation, background or other similarities. Not only did most of them write for Amnesty during the #Schrijfmarathon, they also activated their audience and asked them to write too.

Effect

The effect was enormous. About 101.000 letters were written on 350 locations, breaking the record with some 30.000 letters more than the previous year. The best of all was that almost half of the cases ended with a release from prison.